The Servant nodded and continued tracing his hand along the stones. “I have found there are many incredible things that change over time. Think about how this stone has shifted. Where must it have been taken from the earth itself?”
I looked over and realized he was pointing to a white stone with a perfectly smooth surface, marred only by a few markings that had been burned on its side. It was different from the gray one next to it, the brown one on the other side, and the black one nearby.
“Each of these stones came from someplace else, someplace beneath the earth, and over time, they changed, becoming this.” He smiled to himself. “Affellah changes them.”
“How does Affellah change the stones?”
“Have you ever poured heat into a stone?”
“I suppose I haven’t,” I said.
“Why don’t you try?”
I focused on the cycle and could feel the power that burned within me rising, almost as if the dragon responded, and through him, there was a connection to the other dragons within my cycle. It was faint, and as before, I was increasingly aware that the Vard prevented me from fully accessing that connection, but they didn’t limit it completely.
I then focused on the stone in front of me. “What do you want me to do with it?”
“Feel the energy within it.”
I crouched down in front of the stone, holding my hands out much like he had, and glanced to him, curious if he thought to guide me or whether he was going to let me use my cycle without limitation. I began to let that power flow.
As I did, I closed my eyes, feeling the cycle filling me. It was not nearly as potent as it had been within the Academy or outside of the Vard lands. There was a fluttering of heat, a stirring as it moved from me to the dragon nearest me, then outward and to the rest of the cycle. By the time it returned, I knew I could command that power. I pushed it out from my fingertips and weaved it between them. There was a distinct drawing of energy, but it called on something more from within me, taking more strength than I was accustomed to. When my connection to the dragon touched upon the stone, I detected it as little more than an interruption, and tried to let that power flow outward, into the stone. I tried to change it the way he wanted, but it did not change. Nothing did. I felt the stone as a barrier, nothing more than that.
“Nothing is happening,” I said.
I opened my eyes and looked over to the Servant, who seemed to watch me with an unreadable expression in his eyes. Was it disappointment? Satisfaction, even?
Maybe this was some way of testing whether I had enough power to resist whatever it was he wanted to do.
I would have to hold back, prevent him from knowing the extent of my connection to my cycle. This way, if they were going to try to hold me, to harm me, I could be prepared for it, and I would be able to resist.
“It would if you open yourself to Affellah,” he finally said.
I looked at the stone, then back to him. “Why do you think I can?”
“Because I saw it within you.”
“And that’s why you wanted me to come here?”
“I wanted you to come because Affellah wanted you to come,” he said.
“Then why don’t you help me find Affellah?”
He cocked his head to the side, frowning. The tension in his face, the strange tightness that came across his features as he made the movement, seemed unnatural, and heat and energy blossomed from him again. “What am I doing but trying to bring you to Affellah?”
Chapter Four
We reached a rocky cliff, and from here, the ground dropped off below. Far beneath us ran what looked to be water, though it was difficult to say. I’d never seen anything like this, even when I’d been traveling with my dragon.
“What is this place?” I asked, looking over to the Servant.
It was the middle of the day and the sun was shining down hot upon us, yet he seemed comfortable. In fact, the Servant always seemed comfortable. He took everything in stride, and he looked at the ground stretching in front of us in the same way, watching it with a burning intensity in his eyes.
“This is the edge.”
“The edge of what?”
“The edge of our lands,” he said.
“I thought the Vard-controlled land stretched even farther than this,” I said. “When I traveled by dragon—”
The Servant laughed, and the strange, unsettling sound carried over the landscape. We had been traveling by foot for the last day and a half, having left the village behind, as well as the water supply, forcing me to limit how much of the water I consumed so I didn’t burn through it too quickly. “Traveling above these lands will not permit you to know them. In order for you to truly understand Affellah, you must walk amongst it, you must feel it flow, you must feel it burn.”
“I think I can feel all of that staying in one place. You wanted me to see all of the Vard lands for a reason.” I still wasn’t exactly sure what that was, though it wasn’t just about exploring villages, seeing the people, and coming to understand the connection they all had to fire. Maybe that was a part of it, but it was a small part of what he wanted from me. He wanted me to understand Affellah.
“You have seen the extent of our lands.”
If this was the extent of them, then they were all bleak, hot, and dry. Not at all like I had anticipated the Vard lands to be.
“I thought your people had connected to the Southern Reach, and were using that to attack my people.”
“And who are your people?”
“Don’t do this,” I said.
He shook his head. “I’m not doing anything. I am trying to understand. Is that not what you would have me do?”
“You’re questioning me,” I said.
“I am helping you to question,” he said.
“I told you about my lands.”
“You’ve told me about your farming, the city, and the dragon. You’ve not told me about your land.”
I looked over, staring at the edge of the rocky cliff. I wondered what it might be like to soar on the dragon’s back, to feel the descent as we floated down.
The sense of the dragon was there, though distant. It seemed as if the Servant was trying to get me as far away from the dragon as possible, trying to separate me from that power. Was he afraid I might use it against him?
Still, I could feel that power. The cycle existed within me, and there was a part of me that questioned whether I might be able to push enough of the cycle toward the green dragon so he might be able to break through whatever restriction the Vard placed around him that held him to the volcano. I had been giving it some thought during our walk, plotting my escape, if it came down to that. I wouldn’t be able to travel over ground. The Servant had made that abundantly clear. I wouldn’t have enough water, and I wouldn’t know how to travel safely. But by dragon back, none of that would matter.
I realized I hadn’t responded to the Servant’s last statement. Hadn’t I told him about my land? “I’m not exactly sure what you mean.”
“A farmer should know about his land.”
“We grew corn, beans, other vegetables,” I said. “The growing seasons were short. We had to deal with the heavy rains between the dry seasons, but . . .”
“Dry?” he asked.
“Nothing like this,” I said.
What I had once considered dry was quite different than what I understood now. Dry was relative, I knew, but at this point, there was nothing that rivaled anything like this. These people knew true drought. I couldn’t even imagine how they found food.
In the last village, there had been a small garden, fed by the well, but it had taken everybody in the village working together to keep the garden growing, and I couldn’t believe it would produce enough to provide for the entire village.
“I’ve been wondering how your people can stay in these lands. The Southern Reach is greener, and would provide more for you.”
“This is what we have known,” the Servant said. “And Affell
ah has provided all that we need.”
“What happens if Affellah stops providing what you need?”
“Then we suffer. It will be as Affellah decides.”
“And you don’t want to go anywhere else?”
“Where would we go?”
“Well, I assume you are trying to expand your reach into the kingdom.”
“Because you think we want your lands.”
“I think you want something,” I said.
“When I was much younger,” the Servant said, staring at the edge of the lands, “we had a wide river that still flowed through these lands.” His eyes stared out in the distance, a faraway look in them. “There was a time when people didn’t have to dig deep into the ground, a time when we didn’t have to search for water and wells that were otherwise inaccessible. There was a time when we were able to know all of this.”
“What changed?”
He looked over to me and smiled. “That is why you’re here.”
“You want me to help you understand what happened to your river?”
“I want you to tell me about your land,” the Servant said.
“We’ve already gone through this.”
“Has anything in your land changed?”
I shrugged. “Seasons change, and sometimes they’re wetter or drier than others, but the only other real change has been the coming of the king, claiming the plains as his own, wanting access to the Wilds.” I looked over, and wondered if maybe I had said too much. Was I admitting something about the king that I should not?
I needed to be careful. I knew that, and I knew I didn’t need to reveal any information that would potentially put the kingdom—and those whom I claimed I wanted to protect—in any danger.
The Servant just watched me. “What are the rains like in wet seasons?”
It was a sincere, though strange, question. “They are powerful. They can flood the entire plain in a matter of an hour. That’s how I lost my father.”
I tried not to think about that time, but every so often, I found myself going back to it, remembering how he had looked as his life had faded, the relief I had felt at his suffering being over—and the shame I had known at that emotion.
“So your land is challenging.”
I looked around at the surrounding landscape. It didn’t seem like my land was nearly as hard as what they lived in. It left me wondering how we’d ever pushed back the Vard. Why would these people have stayed here?
“I suppose every land is hard,” I said.
“Everything has its own unique challenges,” he said. “Some are meant to be a challenge, and others are meant to be something else.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You have felt the power of this place, have you not?”
I nodded. “I can feel it,” I said. There was no denying the fact that I could feel the energy of Affellah here. Even if I didn’t know what that power meant, I could still feel it, something that flowed within the ground, that seemed to provide energy and power—something that changed it.
“Affellah holds us together,” he said.
“Against what?” I asked.
“That is the question, is it not?” the Servant asked.
He turned and started making his way along the ridgeline.
“What happened here?”
“You would not believe,” the Servant said.
“This is why you brought me here.”
“I brought you here to understand. Perhaps to reach for the power of Affellah.”
He had said that before. I had no idea what it might mean for me to understand what it was he hoped I could come to learn, or if there really was any way for me to do it. The idea seemed impossible. How could I understand this god he served? How I could understand the kind of power—or the desire for that power—that changed somebody to look like the Servant?
“And then what?”
He looked over, a hint of a smile in his eyes. “And then you must make the rest of the connection. You must decide if that is what you want for yourself.”
He continued walking. We reached a strange valley we had to descend into, then we stepped up on the side. The barren, rocky land had not changed at all, and when we emerged, he stopped, turning to the small depression we had crossed.
“This was once a river,” he said, sweeping his hand across the area. “It dumped over the edge, pouring out and leading to a beautiful waterfall.”
“I can’t even imagine,” I said.
“We called it the end of the earth.” He smiled tightly again, and the skin on his face shifted again. “Perhaps that was a misnomer. We understood it wasn’t really the end of the earth, but there were those among us who could not have imagined going anywhere else.”
“If there was a river here, there would’ve been other things. There would’ve been life.”
He nodded. “There would have been.”
“Then what happened?”
“Darkness happened,” he said softly.
“What kind of darkness?”
He looked around, turning his attention back to Affellah before turning back to me. “The kind that Affellah helped us defeat.”
He continued walking, though he shifted his course, following the path the river had once taken. I trailed after him. My feet were sore and blisters had formed, though I tried to ignore them. Every so often, I would try to connect to the dragon, to use his power to find a thread between us and find a way to latch on to that. While the barrier prevented us from connecting the way we should, there was something else that seemed to be between us, something else that limited me.
The Servant stayed several paces in front of me, and as we walked, I found it strange to think about how all of this had once been so different.
When I traveled across here by dragon back, I hadn’t been able to see it, but that was at night with Thomas.
A river meant life.
There had been water here at one point. Could these lands have really changed so much that whatever life had existed had been burned away? It seemed impossible, but I understood drought.
We had drier seasons periodically on the plains. Not often, but we understood how there could be variations to seasons. On average, though, we had considerably high rains. It made the plains a difficult place to live—at least, I had always considered it difficult, but I’d never thought it was harsh like this. That said, it was all I had ever known. Much like this was all the Servant had ever known.
I watched him as he strode in front of me. He wanted me to see this.
Was this some way to understand Affellah?
Or was this his way of showing me his lands, showing me what they had been subjected to, and showing me how much they had suffered over the years and survived? Perhaps there was an ulterior motive behind all of this. He wanted me to know his people were hard, but they were also survivors.
I had to keep thinking about it in terms of what he might want me to bring back to the king. A message, I was sure of it. Could he be showing me this to try to convince the king to help his people?
Maybe all of this was simply his way of trying to demonstrate that Affellah was hard, just like the land and its people. It was his way of telling me I wasn’t going to be able to escape easily, and the kingdom wouldn’t defeat these people easily.
If that was his intention, he was doing it in a strange manner. He had not threatened me at all. Which made me think that wasn’t really his intention.
I had been with him for several days now, but I had no reason to believe he wanted to harm me.
He glanced back for a moment, a knowing look on his face.
These weren’t violent people.
These were people who wanted what the kingdom had. To me, it might seem like they have bleak lands, but to them . . .
It was all they had ever known. Part of me still missed the wet and dry seasons that were all I had ever known prior to leaving the kingdom, despite how hard and harsh they were. That was wha
t I had grown up around. That was the life I had known.
No different from the people of the Vard lands.
Something Natalie’s father had said came back to me. The Vard had not attacked in a long time. The Djarn had known the truth.
I headed over to the Servant, watching him. “Do you know who is actually responsible for the attack on the kingdom?” He turned to me, and it seemed as if heat and flame burned in his eyes. “Do you know who wanted to make it look like your people were responsible?”
“You would not understand,” he said, his voice harsh but soft.
“But you brought me here. Wouldn’t your god want you to help me understand? Isn’t that what Affellah is asking of you?”
He smiled slightly. “The question you must focus on is what Affellah is asking of you.”
I snorted, shaking my head. “Nothing. I came here to understand.” As I looked around, my cycle growing distant with each passing hour, I felt like maybe this was a mistake. Maybe I needed to return to the kingdom. I didn’t have any reason to believe he would hold me here.
“Then search for understanding rather than ignorance.”
He started forward, leaving me with my thoughts.
I was tempted to depart, tempted to leave him then, but I did not.
The rest of the day passed in silence. I tried to engage the Servant in conversation, but I couldn’t get him to speak about anything. As night began to bloom around us, the energy in the air shifted, as if the Servant’s energy weakened with the dawning of night.
He stopped, resting near the dry riverbed, and created another small fire like he did most nights. Thunder rumbled distantly, and for a moment, it was easy enough to think I was back on the plains. There, thunder was a constant companion, a sweeping energy that rolled over the plains, carrying it with violent storms, but also the promise of life.
Here in the Vard lands, they didn’t have the promise of life at all.
He leaned back and pulled out some meat from his pouch, then handed me a strip of jerky. He must have replenished his food supply in the village, but I hadn’t seen him do that. Did they have so much that they were willing to share with him—and, by association, with me?
The Summoned Dragon (Cycle of Dragons Book 4) Page 4
